ISO27001:2013 Certified Supplier

How Seriously Do We Take Information Security?

We’re an IT company: you’d expect us to say that we take information security seriously – and we do.

But We Would Say That, Wouldn’t We?

We don’t think you should have to take our word for it, so back in 2014 we embarked upon the journey to certification under ISO27001:2013, the Information Security standard. We examined, refined, documented and tested every aspect of Information Security, both within Tiger Computing and extending to how we manage and support our clients’ systems. In May 2015, we put ourselves to the test. We were independently audited and were assessed and certified as meeting the requirements of ISO27001:2013.

What Does This Mean For You?

It means that you can rest assured that we take Information Security seriously; that we will continue to refine and improve our Information Security policies; and that we will be independently audited annually to confirm that we are maintaining the required high standards of ISO27001:2013.

What’s Next?

We will continue to grow our support, management and monitoring infrastructure to ensure that our clients have the very best availability of your systems – and we’ll continue building our team of the best Linux experts in the UK.

Linux Support Services Cost: Some Points To Consider

There are three points to consider when researching the cost of Linux support services:

the initial cost of getting your infrastructure “on board” with a support company

the ongoing costs (monthly or annual)

the lock-in period (how much you’re committed to pay if you want to leave)

First, let’s take a look at the initial costs of getting your servers, etc, into the support company’s systems. Then we’ll take a look at the ongoing costs, including any penalties if you decide to terminate the agreement, and finally we’ll look at the factors that affect cost to the support company of providing those services.

Initial Costs

At Tiger Computing, we take all existing servers for a new client through a formal “server onboarding” process. What does that involve?

Pre-Contract Check

Each server undergoes a series of checks (around 30 in total) to determine how this server can best be supported.

There are four possible results:

The server can be supported immediately at any of our support levels

The server can be supported immediately at some of our support levels

The server can be supported, but requires some remedial work first

The server cannot be supported in its current form

The output of this process is a written report for you that is not dissimilar to a car MoT check. It includes:

a list of checks carried out, and the result of each

the support levels available for this server

details of any mandatory work that must be completed before the server can be supported

details of any recommendations our consultant may have

Mandatory Remedial Work

By far the most common result of the pre-contract check is that some remedial work is required. This is generally straightforward, and often means ensuring that all security updates are installed and that the configuration of the server is appropriate for support.

This is like an MoT failure because of a cracked number plate: it needs to be fixed before the car can pass, but it isn’t a major problem.

Recommended Work

During the pre-contract check process, our consultant may become aware of suboptimal configuration or security issues that do not prevent us from offering a support contract, but which you should be aware of.

This is like the MoT report that the front offside tyre has 3mm of tread remaining: not a reason to fail, but something that should be addressed soon.

Costs

The cost of the pre-contract check is £250 per server. That does not include any mandatory remedial work required, but we’ll often resolve quick, minor issues (with your consent) free of charge as a gesture of goodwill. For more involved remedial work, we’ll let you have a quote before going ahead.

For most servers, the cost of the remedial work is under £150.

Ongoing Costs

These costs fall into four areas:

A Strategy Session

Consultancy

Server Support

Projects

Let’s look at each in turn.

Strategy Session

These are 1-2 day workshops with one of our senior consultants. The aim is typically:

a review of IT strategy

to consider major changes to your IT infrastructure

to examine the introduction of new technology

Optionally, the consultant may supply a written report following the Strategy Session.

Costs

The costs will depend upon the duration and scope of the Strategy Session, where it’s held, and whether a written report is required. We will always provide a fixed-price quote beforehand, but expect to pay £1500 – £4000 fully inclusive.

Consultancy

Consultancy services are a step up from a Strategy Session. They may include researching solutions to a specific requirement, prototyping a solution, liaising with third party suppliers or even customers, or setting up a solution with your own staff alongside so that they have an understanding of the architecture.

Costs

The costs vary depending upon the knowledge and experience required to meet the goals. Where possible, we’ll issue a fixed-price quote beforehand, but expect to pay £1000 – £1600 per day.

Server Support

The details of our support services are detailed on our Server Support Packages page. There are a number of factors that determine the cost of support, including:

Hours of cover: these range from 24/7/365 down to 9-5, Monday to Friday.

The Service Level Agreement: response times vary from unstated on our Economy Package to 10 minutes for critical issues with our Premier Support package.

Server complexity: a simple web server will cost less to support than a Highly Available Cluster with shared data replicated in real time.

Number of servers: the cost will increase with the number of servers.

What’s included: we want to ensure that all day to day activities are covered, so a web hosting business might want to include up to ten new skeletal websites with TLS (SSL) certificates installed per month, and a bioscience research business might want to include monthly updates to a particular toolset.

Lock-in: we don’t like lock-ins. We want our clients to stay with us because they want to, not because of some contractual obligation. Typically, our clients can terminate their agreement with us with 30 days’ notice. Occasionally, we will agree a minimum period with a client when that is mutually beneficial, but it’s unusual.

Costs

Expect to pay around £150 – £400 per server, per month.

The Cost Of Service Provision

To a large extent, you may not care how much it costs your support company to provide you with support services: you have to pay (or not) the cost they quote you. Here at Tiger Computing we like to be transparent in our pricing and costs, so let’s look at our cost basis.

Staff

It will be no surprise that our biggest cost by far is the cost of employing our staff. Good Linux consultants are hard to find, so we need to ensure that we both attract and retain the very best. That’s not cheap. Here’s where some of our costs are incurred:

UK based staff: we do not employ staff based overseas. Yes, it would be cheaper to employ staff located in India or the Philippines or Croatia, but we feel the quality of the service would be adversely affected.

Experienced staff: our senior staff in particular have experience working with a wide range of clients across a broad industry spectrum. They’re equally at home discussing the challenges faced by semiconductor chip development, bioscience research, database tuning or optimal web configuration – and much more.

Great offices: it matters. We all spend enough time at work to want to be somewhere nice. We’re situated in the Wye Valley next to the Forest of Dean, with the river Wye and the rolling Welsh and English countryside as the backdrop. We provide our staff with real coffee, soft drinks and even occasional cakes, all for free. We give them their choice of keyboard, monitor and mouse – why wouldn’t we? They’re technically excellent, so we give them what they want.

Training: our staff regularly attend accredited training courses to keep their skills up to date. In addition to that, we allocate Continuous Professional Development (CPD) time to staff.

Conferences: we send all our senior technical staff to at least one technical conference a year, often more. They’ll either be attendees or, often, they’ll be presenting.

Support FOSS: we support Free and Open Source Software. That’s the foundation that our business and, to some extent at least, that of our clients is built upon, and it’s what we believe in. Our staff have time to contribute to various FOSS projects.

BS7858 and ISO27001: we take security very seriously. All of our staff are security screened under BS7858, and Tiger Computing is certified under ISO27001:2013, the information security standard. All of our staff regularly receive security training.

Infrastructure

Our second biggest expense after staff is the infrastructure we use to support our clients. We use what we sell: all of our servers run Linux, mostly Debian, and they are supported in the same way as we support our clients’ systems.

The key components are our:

Configuration Management System

System Monitoring Platform

Documentation Management System

Version Control and Change Management System

We’re constantly evolving our infrastructure, and all of the above are incrementally improved on a monthly, if not weekly, basis.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Linux Support Services pricing in a nutshell, and some peeping under the covers to see where the money goes. Be sure to look at the other articles in TigerU to learn more about using Linux efficiently in your business.